Protecting Business Innovations via Patent
Watch Course Overview: https://youtu.be/mUja4iwbrTE
This course assumes no prior knowledge in law, business or engineering. However, students with backgrounds in all three areas will find useful concepts or ideas in the course on how to protect business innovations using patents. The approach taken in this course is practical and commercial rather than theoretical. A combination of lectures and case studies help to illustrate the concepts and make the course more interesting.
After completing this course, students should be able to understand how patents are issued and protect innovations, including: What is a patent? What do they protect? How do we get a patent? Where are patents valid? How much do they cost?
In addition to basic concepts the course also deals with advanced topics such as: software patents, business process patents, patenting life, patent trolls and multiple case examples of large and small companies using patents and patent lawsuits.
We also expect you to have fun in this course. So go forth and enjoy!

DC

Course was well design, will helps the learner to get good exposure.\n\nEveryone, want to work in this area need to attend this course.

AA

Mar 10, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

This course is made easy and very practical. The Instructor is excellent. I will suggest you take it.

De la lección

ADVANCED PATENT TOPICS

You left room for dessert right? In this week we learn about patent trolls, software patents, business process patents, patenting life and case examples of large and small companies using and going to court over patents.

Impartido por:

Theodore Henry King CLARK

Associate Professor

Transcripción

Welcome back to our course on protecting business innovations via patents. In this session, we're going to be talking about patenting life. What is patenting life? Well, when we talk about patenting life, we're talking about useful bacteria of organisms of various types. But it includes food, medicine, human genes. Not all life that is patented is a GMO. You might think of GMOs as food, but anything that is genetically modified as an organism is a GMO. And if you're going to get a patent, you have to have created it in a lab in some way or at least refined it and isolated it in a patentable process. One of the most important Supreme Court cases over the past couple of decades has been this case in 1980 where the Supreme Court ruled that life could be patented. As a result of this case, which was the first time the courts had said that life could be patented, a genetically modified bacteria useful for cleaning up oil spills, useful for digesting oil and turning it into another product that would sink to the bottom of the ocean, patenting life was possible. The government had denied the patent. It had been appealed, appealed, and appealed. It had gone to multiple courts until it went to the Supreme Court. And finally, the Supreme Court said life may be patented. That opened the floodgate for the biotech industry. A huge amount of money went into biotech after that case because finally you could make money on this research. It was no longer the domain just of universities, this was now big profit. And so a lot more students went into biotech, a lot more courses were taught on biotech, a lot more venture funding went into biotech startups. And a lot more money was made by biotech and pharmaceutical companies who are focused on biotech. But it's not just pharmacy or drugs, it's also food. A big pioneer in patenting life was Monsanto. Monsanto is a chemical company and they make a variety of products, one of which is a genetically modified soybean. This soybean patented in 1998 by Monsanto, by the mid 2000s had almost complete dominance of the US soybean market, including a lot of international exports. Because what this soybean did is it made it cheaper to plant soybeans with higher yield and lower labor cost by using Monsanto Round-up, a chemical product. Combined with the Monsanto soy bean which was resistant to Round-Up, they could plant more densely, have less labor, have higher yield, and kill all the weeds in the crop that were associated with this product. So it was very efficient and there was big money. Monsanto made a lot of money out of this product. And now they're working on Monsanto corn and other products to try to get patents on other types of food. They're not alone, there are many companies working on a variety of food product patents. But Monsanto is big and the big money. Bigger money is the biotech industry, the whole pharmaceutical money. Drugs are huge money. They're 3% of the US GDP. It's a lot of revenues and the profits are higher than that of banks. They're the highest profit margin of any industry in America, with the average profit margin across the industry, 21%. Some companies like Pfizer's, up to 42%, that's incredible. That's their margin on sales, their profit margin is a percentage of sales, 42%. Patents are critical to that. You would never make those kinds of profits without patent protection. Of course, the industry complains patent life is not long enough, we should get extensions. It's not long enough to make the kind of money we want, but then profits are huge. In addition, the R&D is pretty big, too. 21% of all US R&D is pharmaceuticals, bigger than any other industry by far. But what's interesting is most of the new drugs are coming from small companies, startups, new businesses. Which is good, that's what patent law encourages. But the big companies, a lot of their profits come from raising prices or buying out rivals and consolidating in the industry. And so it's not just drugs that give them the high money, it's not just patents that give them the high money, it's also part of strategy. One of the most important parts of life and patenting life is genes. Not just any genes, but human genes. And we can actually patent new forms of human genes that can help your body overcome cancer or can treat different diseases. It's not just biotech, but even just examining the nature of human life itself. Now you can't patent a naturally occurring genes, but you can patent anything which is derived and modified from the body, both humans and animals, any genes. Patenting life has some big pros. For example, the United States government and other governments across the world spent US $500 million in ten years on the Human Genome Project to map the gene of a human being. It took ten years and $500 million. Today, because of high tech, because of investments, because of computing power, because of innovations of startup companies, we can now do this for $1,000 in a few days with a desktop sequencer. This is amazing, 500 million, ten years versus $1,000, a few days. That's the kind of power we saw from a supercomputer in the 1970s to an iPhone today of similar power, of a supercomputer of 40 years ago. The Human Longevity Project is a video that I'm going to put a link into the course description which describes a company focused on this. A startup entrepreneurial company that can enable you to take more possession and power of your life. You don't have to go buy their products or do their services, but you might want to be aware of what's happening that may improve your life or the life of others. But there are some cons. Some people say this limits the use of genes. It limits the use of organisms in R&D. It restricts what universities can do or what other companies can do. It may also limit your options. It may make your drugs more expensive than you can afford. It may make companies slower to bring out high quality products. It may mean that a company doesn't have to be the best in the industry because they don't have any competition. And maybe they don't detect something that they might have been able to if there was a better competing product. And so there's high healthcare cost issues and potentially quality issues that might hurt the quality of healthcare because of monopolies or patents. And some people don't like the patenting of life for those reasons. In summary, life can be patented, many kinds of life, many kinds of useful bacteria, many useful organisms, food, medicine, human being genes, only modifiable genes but modified genes. And it's not just US law, it's more and more becoming global law and it's a big, big business today. There's a lot of money in patenting life. Thank you. [MUSIC]